I
was taking a bit of a break from writing today and came across this image in my Facebook timeline. My first reaction was to post angrily about the rather ignorant view of economics. To equate real life economics to those of Monopoly implies that the original poster was just completely clueless about economics or, and this is more likely, was deliberately ignoring those differences in order to elicit the sorts of emotional, anti-capitalism comments the post received.
Real world economics,
I am taking a break from reading Ayn Rand’s “Captialism: The Unknown Ideal” and have started in on “The Myth of the Robber Barons” by Burt Folsom. I have not read a great deal as yet, just the first couple of chapters, but it is fascinating reading. The author gives a pretty complete picture of the big businessmen
In the essay “Antitrust,” which is contained in Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,” Alan Greenspan, long before he became chairman of the Federal Reserve, discussed the emergence of antitrust legislation at the end of the 19th century.
In the early 19th century, railroads developed in the East among stiff competition, between different railroads as well as with older forms of transportation. By the 1860’s a political movement developed demanding that